SHADOWLANDS: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Cities

Written with great literary flair, inquisitiveness, soul-searching and humanity, this is a haunting work of resurrection and an odd fictional encyclopaedia of disappeared cities, lost towns and ghost villages. Matthew Green reimagines the lives of those who walked their streets as he peers through the cracks of history to find Dunwich, a medieval city plunged off a cliff by sea storms, the abandoned village of Wharram Percy, wiped out by the Black Death, the lost city of Trellech, unearthed by moles in 2002, and a Norfolk village zombified by the military and turned into a Nazi, Soviet, and Afghan village for training. British historian and broadcaster Matthew Green tells the astonishing tales of the rise and demise of these places, animating the people who lived, worked, dreamed and died there as he travels across Britain exploring their haunting and often-beautiful remains. Mourned by evictees and reimagined by artists, writers and mavericks, he gives us the taste of medieval wine or the sights of puffin hunting on the tallest cliffs in the country. His first discovery lay in one of the remotest corners in Scotland, Skara Brae, to find houses beneath the sand before we travel to the obliterated port of Winchelsea and the abandoned island of St Kilda. Tiny remainder mark, 358pp, illus.